33 Comments

So far the only drive to use 3-bit-per-cell (TLC) NAND is the Samsung SSD 840. At least both Samsung and IMFT have 128Gb TLC but as of today I have not heard it being used in an SSD. The successor of SSD 840 will probably move to 128Gb TLC NAND to cut costs even more but that's at least a quarter away (this is just a guess, we don't have any info yet),Reply

The funny thing about the ambiguous picture modes Samsung uses is that they're not even consistent among Samsung products. Natural mode on my Samsung TV makes people look like Nicki Minaj.

Also about the dynamic contrast thing. I think Brian's talking about CE dimming where it dims the backlight based on the brightness of content on the screen. Of course this makes absolutely no sense to me with a edge-lit LCD. If you rename the input to PC, it disables some of the image processing, including CE dimming. Unfortunately, it disables a lot of the features like motion interpolation. Fortunately, most of Samsung's features serve only to make the picture worse somehow. I actually get less input lag with the input renamed to PC than with game mode on.Reply

Can we please get a podcast that doesn't include phones or tablets? Is technology so dead that only mobile devices are worth talking about? 4 out of 5 casts are based around this crap. It's too much.Reply

I need an edit button. I just realized podcasts were now under the smartphone category on the site. The Anandtech Podcast is officially dead. When did that happen? Ah well, completely ignorable now, so nevermind.Reply

It's true that most of the podcasts discuss smartphones/tablets (some more, some less) but there have been episodes that have focused on other topics. For example episode 18 was about the site redesign and GPUs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6874/the-anandtech-p...

I think one of the things that makes Anandtech podcasts great is that you guys talk about what you are passionate about. That happens to be smart phones much of the time, and I'm fine with listening to talk about smart phones, even though I'm not really interested in buying any of the phones that exist. I always come away from Anandtech podcasts knowing more about the technology discussed and the industry and what goes on in it. I enjoy listening to people who know their hind quarters from the proverbial hole in the ground, and the Anandtech editors give me that better than any other site I've listened to. I never have the thought "That guy is freakin clueless" when I'm listening to an Anandtech podcast; I can't say that about any other site's podcast I've listened to.

And, frankly there just isn't a lot of exciting things to talk about in the PC world right now. People are still doing reviews of socket 1155 boards, and I have no interest in any of them. Basically, if it isn't about Haswell or maybe Ivy Bridge-E, I could care less. There isn't anything cool happening with GPUs, CPUs, or even SSDs right now. You talked about the most exciting thing going on, which was the price breakthrough of the M500 @ 960GB, and that's about all there was to say anything about. I would like more discussion about PC components, that's what I'm really interested in, but, really, what is there to say?

The most important thing to me is knowledgeable, enthusiastic discussion, and that's what you are delivering, so, no real complaints from me. As it stands right now, the most movement is in the mobile industry, so that deserves the lion's share of the podcast, in my opinion. When June hits and we have real information about Haswell and the related products, hopefully there will be something we can all sink our proverbial teeth into and we'll get more of that in the podcasts, but that's then, not now.Reply

We kind of have settled into a pattern where we alternate between primarily PC focus, and primarily mobile focus. The reality is that the previous week was dominated by mobile related news, so that's what we talked about. Haswell is almost imminent, at which point I'm sure things will change back the other way as mobile slows down (hopefully).

I have been reading Anandtech for years but only just started listening to the podcasts in May. I am current with the podcasts now. I have never really been too interested in the technology that makes cellular phones possible but as the market shifts to mobile computing I am finding myself more interested. I've learned much catching up on the podcasts here. Many times your contributions are a bit over my head but Anand does a good job stopping and clarifying some of the details you gloss over. In my experience you two have provided a good balance in the discussions. As a generally inquisitive person I have been motivated by these discussions to learn more than I would have without them.

I think we are close to the point where the term smartphone isn't really the best description of today's flagship mobile devices since the phone functionality is no longer the dominant feature.

I agree with Sabresiberian's comment above. The enthusiasm of the discussion really hooks me as much as the topics do.

Are we certain that we always need 10-25% spare area or is there a hard GB limit - a point of diminishing returns?

Do you need 10-25% free for ALL capacities? I don't want to lose 512GB when we get to 2TB SSDs. If the point is to ensure that you have the necessary space to allow garbage collection to properly do its job, wouldn't that mean that it mostly depends upon how much data is written between collection processes?

Obviously we know that 20% free shows improvements for nearly all drives, but what if we don't need that much for larger drives? If 20% of a 256GB drive (50GB) works well, would 50GB of free space work just as well on a 512GB or 1TB drive? The consistency of the 960GB M500 doesn't appear to improve all that much when you move from the stock 9% (64GB) spare area to an arbitrary 25%.

Also, I'm curious if spare area is spread out across all NAND dies or if spare area takes up NAND dies in some sort of sequential fashion and how that impacts the performance gains of spare area among different drives/controllers.Reply

It was interesting to hear about the Asus Fonepad in the podcast. After reading some other reviews the battery life seems great and the performance is decent. Are there any plans for a review of some kind?Reply